What are Actors in Unreal Engine 5?
Actors are any object that can be placed or spawned in a level - actors are the most basic gameplay elements that can have 3D transforms (location, rotation, scale). Examples of Actors include meshes like cubes or spheres, a camera, a player start, a light, a Mech or a dinosaur. Actors are the building blocks of any games scene.
How do you place an Actor in the level?
Many of your actors will take the form of blueprints that can contain mesh components, colliders and gameplay logic, but the simplest actors can be placed right away in your level by using the Place Actor button - a Cube with the Plus sign just above the Viewport.
Where is the Actors Panel in UE5?
Another easy method is the Place Actor Panel which you can can access by going to the Window menu and selecting 'Place Actors'.
This panel is hidden by default in the new Unreal 5 layout but was a standard part of the UE4 layout. Did you know you can re-enabled by going to the Window menu -> Load Layout ->Classic UE4 Layout. From this panel you can drag various actors in to the scene.
How to move Actors around the level?
Most actor have a root component which gives them a transform. Transforms contain the location, rotation and scale information for a gameplay object. When you click an actor in the view port you will see 3 arrows coming out the center of the actor. This is the location or translation widget. (Translation means to move!) Left clicking one of the arrows with the mouse will allow you to slide the actor in the direction of the arrow.
How do you make actors do stuff?
Creating a blueprint actor is the easiest way to get actors to do things like move, play sounds or interact with a player. See the how to below to learn how to create a simple actor blueprint. If you want to turn an actor already in your scene into a blueprint, take a look at the details panel on the right and click the Blueprint button next to the Add button. From here you can make it into a blueprint!